For decades, owning a home has been one of the safest and most profitable investments an American could make, and the country has been alive to the fact. Households in the United States, taken together, spend nearly all that they earn, and save next to nothing. It is thanks only to high homeownership and rising home prices that they have seen their net worth grow. The nation’s housing has been both its savings and a key enabler of economic expansion: The long boom in house prices powered consumption that would otherwise have seemed unaffordable. That is why falling house prices—something that the country as a whole has not witnessed since the 1930s—are hurting so much, and why they pose such a danger to the economy.

The cultural importance of homeownership has deep roots. In many societies, owning property was once a requirement for full citizenship, and almost all Western democracies gave property owners the vote first. Even so, the United States is unusual in the importance its citizens attach to owning a home—and, as driving through the country’s endless suburbs leads one to conclude, preferably the biggest home possible. Lavish tax breaks have expressed and redoubled the enthusiasm for many rooms of one’s own, and for the titanic mortgages required to pay for them. The cultural attachment came first; the tax relief duly followed. Together, they seem immovable.

Yet housing weighs heavy on the mind today. And its weight on the economy is heavier than the current downturn suggests. It’s time to move beyond the subprime mortgage meltdown and ask a more fundamental question: Is it good for society that Americans aspire to own homes, rather than merely live in them?

Widespread homeownership, the theory goes, benefits the nation because homeowners—literally invested in their communities—make better citizens. A few years ago, the economists Edward Glaeser and Jesse Shapiro looked at the evidence and concluded that, by and large, this is true: Even allowing for confounding factors such as income, family size, age, and so forth, owners spend more on maintaining their homes, vote more, play a more active part in local politics, and work harder to improve their neighborhoods.

But there are drawbacks, too. Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick, found that homeownership makes workers less mobile, which brakes economic growth and worsens unemployment, especially in areas blighted by the decline of locally dominant industries. Strictly speaking, whether this is a social problem is debatable. The costs of unemployment are borne mostly by the unemployed, not by others. Workers in company towns might be wise to spread their risk rather than sink their savings into a house close to the plant—but, you might argue, that is for them to decide. Yet Oswald argues that homeownership helps to calcify whole economies, which weakens the case for subsidy (and introduces the case for new taxes to discourage homeownership).

Glaeser and Shapiro point to other social costs. Communities of homeowners tend to act as cartels—calling for zoning rules, for instance, that suppress new development. At a minimum, the wider benefits of homeownership are not clear-cut.

The mortgage-interest deduction is the backbone of American housing policy. It exists, ostensibly, to encourage widespread homeownership. In its favor, it doesn’t actually do that. But it does have consequences: It’s been one of the quieter causes of the housing bubble. The mortgage-interest deduction deserves special recognition for the stupidity with which it subsidizes something that should not be subsidized in the first place. I challenge you to design a subsidy for homeownership that is as wasteful, as unfair, and as harmful to the economy in the long run.

The current deduction costs nearly $80 billion a year in forgone federal revenues. It is available only to the minority of households—typically affluent— that itemize their taxes. Households at the margin of choosing between renting and owning are not, for the most part, itemizers. The deduction has no effect on their choice, and thus does almost nothing to promote homeownership. What it does promote, studies show, is spending on housing—that is, people who would have been owners anyway pay more for their houses. Prices are higher than they would otherwise have been, and mortgages are bigger. As many owners have learned abruptly, this can worsen economic insecurity.

Heavy spending on housing, fueled by the subsidy, twists the pattern of economic growth as well. If investment in housing goes up, investment in things that would expand the economy and improve future living standards—such as commercial building and business equipment—goes down.

There are other problems. The value of the deduction, of course, is greater for those in higher tax brackets. And the code provides relief against home-equity loans up to $100,000, so that mortgagees, but not renters, can use tax-sheltered debt to buy new cars and televisions. None of this makes a shred of sense.

Is the mortgage-interest deduction untouchable? It may seem so. Ronald Reagan’s grand tax reform of 1986 was radical, but not bold enough to assault the tax break for mortgages. Homeownership, he affirmed, was part of the American dream. When George W. Bush convened a panel of experts in 2005 to revisit fundamental tax reform, he told them, in effect, to leave mortgages alone.

But Britain’s experience says otherwise. Under Margaret Thatcher—committed as she was to “popular capitalism,” her version of the “ownership society” that Bush would later champion—Britain’s mortgage-interest tax deduction began to be phased out. Some 20 years later, it’s gone altogether, with no ill effects. (Perhaps unfortunately, Britain’s rate of homeownership is still about as high as America’s.)

The tax-reform panel advising Bush in 2005—the one he instructed to leave housing out—went ahead and called for reform anyway. Its members accepted the case for subsidizing homeownership, but they said that the mortgage- interest deduction should go. In its place, they suggested a small tax credit (worth the same amount, for a given mortgage, regardless of a person’s tax bracket) capped at a maximum of a few thousand dollars a year. Whether even this much-smaller subsidy makes sense is debatable—but if such a plan were adopted, outright abolition would be but a small additional step. Mild as it is, this halfway reform would likely save tens of billions of dollars, which could be used to pay for other tax cuts—the sort that don’t badly distort the economy or encourage needless risk-taking. Presented as a whole, a package like this surely ought to be sellable.

Britain’s current housing-market troubles show that even without the extra spur of tax-sheltered borrowing, prices can get out of hand and then scare people witless when the mood shifts. Killing the mortgage-interest deduction does not guarantee a calm and steady housing market. And admittedly, this year is not the year to be curbing tax relief for mortgage borrowers. Falling house prices are risky enough for the economy already; the economic consequences of an outright collapse could be dire.

Still, when the housing market stabilizes, Congress and the next administration should ask how we got into this mess in the first place, and then embark on a phased reform. Its benefits would emerge only slowly. But a tax break that fuels speculation and overborrowing, that widens income inequality, and that fails to serve its own questionable purpose deserves a lingering death.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.